With still-preliminary data, it’s difficult to quantify the Latino shift toward Donald Trump and Republicans this election cycle. But there’s no question that it happened across the country and in some places — California, Florida, New Jersey — was dramatic. There’s also no question that it was foreseeable. Previous election results, polls, and on-the-ground reporting provided clues that a reckoning was coming for Democrats, who had once bet that Latinos’ allegiance to the party would ensure its dominance for decades. Jack Herrera saw Latinos’ drifting rightward up close. A freelance reporter, Herrera has written deep dives about immigrant communities, from border counties in Texas to a small town in Iowa. Everywhere he found an electorate angry about the economy, disillusioned with Democrats, and increasingly willing to give Trump a chance. I spoke with him about why Latinos changed their minds, and what it might take to change them back.

There’s been a lot of debate in the aftermath of the election over whether it represents a fundamental realignment, especially among minority voters. You wrote in your postmortem in Politico, “There’s evidence that this year’s vote does not represent a pure wholesale ideological transformation of Latinos” and that, in many places, it was more a referendum on the economy. To me, this implies that if voters’ economic perceptions improve over the next two or four years, they might drift back to Democrats. But the shift toward Republicans was much more dramatic among Latinos than other groups, and we already saw it happening to a lesser extent in 2020. So is it overly simple to say that this is only about economic conditions of the past two or four years?
I do think that this is a political realignment, by and large. My only caution is that it’s not as fundamental a shift as it looks like in the results — that if you take away inflation, and I also think Democrats are still paying the price for being seen as in favor of COVID shutdowns and for high housing costs — if you subtract the economic malaise that damages the incumbent party, I don’t think you see as big a shift this year as we saw.

But there are two warning signs for the Democrats. First off, there is a core shift here that does represent people adopting Trumpism and becoming true believers. It’s not just like, “Biden, you’re fired. The price of eggs is too high.” There are people who are like “You know what? I’m a Republican. I’m a Trump voter.” That’s a significant share. I do think a huge part of the shift, though, is people who are just making things a referendum on the economy. But I don’t think that that means that they just automatically shift back to the Democratic column in 2028. And part of it is — I spoke with Carlos Odio at Equis, one of the best researchers.

Yeah, I actually talked to him a few weeks ago.
He knows what he’s talking about. He made the point that there’s a cognitive pathway here, that when you’ve made a decision, you tend to affirm that decision. It’s like when you buy a new case for your phone. You are primed to say to yourself, “That was a really good decision.” And I think that that will affect people who voted for Trump. Every time you see a reason to affirm yourself as being smart and making the right decision, you’re more likely to look at evidence that you’re smart and made the right decision rather than evidence that you made the wrong decision.

That ties in with another thing you’ve written, which is there’s a sort of critical mass going on here. In some places, it was once verboten to show your support for Trump, and now more and more people are.
Yeah. I think South Texas is a peculiar place, and I think you have to really be cautious about extrapolating what’s happening there to the rest of the country just because it’s a really weird region with a really specific history. Starting before the 2020 election, there were people who were out and about saying, “I’m voting for Trump,” and they were doing Trump trains, which are pickup-truck lines, driving all around the Rio Grande Valley on the highways in South Texas. But they were seen as gadflies and hopelessly outnumbered. And you’d get a lot of shit for supporting Trump. People weren’t afraid to call you pocho or say “Tienes nopal en la frente,” phrases that basically mean you’re self-hating, you’re trying to be white.

That changed really quickly. Suddenly, Trump had quadrupled turnout, and counties Democrats had been winning with 70, 80 percent of the vote, it was closer to 50-50, like swing districts. That taboo still exists in some places — you’re going to take shit from some people — it’s not as strong as it once was. In some places, it’s really just disappeared. And I don’t think you can underestimate that social component, that interpersonal component about what happened in this election.

And some version of that is going on in other places, right? Maybe not as strongly as in Starr County, but it’s happening in the Bronx and in other major cities.
Exactly. It’s happening in the Bronx, it’s happening in Reading, Pennsylvania — I saw it in October — and in Arizona and California. And this is where you see the masculinity angle.........

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